The creation of rendered documents often involves many production and finishing steps that are highly variable with respect to each print job. In general, production and finishing operations can be grouped into a number of phases, including creating document information, performing prepress operations that render the document in a form suitable for printing, rendering the information onto some form of media, and compiling the selected media into a completed document. Such operations often include many sub-phases and the entire process may vary from one that is relatively simple to those that are extremely complex.
In prepress rendering operations, a computer may be utilized to produce, edit, and layout the text, logos, images, pictures, illustrations, and other data parts composing the printed product, and then output an edited layout data in a set of data described in a PDL (Page Description Language). The PDL can be processed and sent to an output device such as, for example, a digital printer for recording on paper or the like. Such prepress processing operations, however, possess limitations regarding the placement of a concatenation node and the operability of individual prepress operations in an automated prepress workflow.
Different prepress operations may access different levels of information related to multi-part jobs and have the ability to perform varying types of manipulations. Such manipulations can be performed more or less easily based on whether the information required is available in the job description. Such variations can lead to potentially incompatible and incoherent behavior, which must be resolved in order to enable the desired workflow flexibility. Consequently, there is a need for a single coherent approach for processing such multi-part jobs in order to provide increased efficiency for the automated prepress workflows.
Based on the foregoing, it is believed that a need exists for an improved system and method for configuring a pre-concatenation execution mode for an automated prepress process node in order to enable the desired workflow flexibility, as described in greater detail herein.